Top Gear's ultimate hot hatch test...

….featuring the ultimate driver. But which car will prevail?

I say this because the first car I want to talk about is the Vauxhall Astra GTC VXR. Now, the old one was a nightclub bouncer of a car, brash and charmless. But things have moved on since 2005, and we're now in the realms of new Vauxhall - shapely Vauxhall. There isn't a shapelier car here than the GTC VXR, nor one with a more comprehensively reworked set of underpinnings (a mechanical differential and the nifty HiPerStrut suspension).